"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."

- Opening lines of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit

For Lord of the Rings fans, Elvish is almost back in the building!

Heading to New Zealand for the premiere of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, there are excellent reasons to be optimistic about Peter Jackson's return to the world of hobbits, dwarves, wizards and dragons.

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First, of course, is Peter Jackson. Despite an earlier plan for Guillermo del Toro to direct two Hobbit movies (with Jackson producing and co-writing the script), no filmmaker could have a better feel for Middle Earth and its characters.

And now that he's drawing on Tolkien's notes for a planned revision and making three movies, few directors in cinema history have shown they can maintain such high storytelling standards over a trilogy.

There are other reasons to feel encouraged:

• Structurally, Tolkien's relatively slim novel tells of a quest by Bilbo Baggins and 13 dwarves to seize treasure guarded by the fearsome dragon Smaug. While it is episodic, Bilbo's growing confidence and his bonding with the dwarves seem readymade for a screen version.

• While Jackson says An Unexpected Journey has a running time of 160 minutes - substantial, but less than the 178, 179 and 201 minutes of The Lord of the Rings movies - he insists there is enough story for another trilogy. Given his pacing of the earlier trilogy was as near perfect as his control of tone and melding of human emotion with epic scale, that's good enough for me.

• Also heading back to Middle Earth is the behind-the-scenes team that won 17 Oscars and many of the key cast, including Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Andy Serkis as Gollum, Cate Blanchett as Galadriel and Hugo Weaving as Elrond. Amid all the acclaim, the strength of the performances was an under-appreciated aspect of The Lord of the Rings, as shown by only one of the trilogy's 30 Oscar nominations going to one of the actors - McKellen for The Fellowship of the Ring.

• English actor Martin Freeman (The Office, Love Actually, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Sherlock) seems almost ideal to play Bilbo Baggins, with his Hobbitish looks and ability to play comedy with heart.

I can think of only three reasons to be not quite so confident:

• Lightning strikes rarely for even the best filmmakers. Considering all the obstacles that Jackson had to overcome on The Lord of the Rings - starting when Harvey Weinstein wanted to replace him with Shakespeare in Love's John Madden if he refused to make just one movie instead of two - its success was nothing short of phenomenal. Could a second trilogy work so well again? Precious few filmmakers have had anywhere near the same success when they return later to familiar territory, including Francis Ford Coppola with The Godfather: Part III, George Lucas with Star Wars - Episode 1: The Phantom Menace and, more recently, Ridley Scott with Prometheus.

SPOILER ALERT: The following paragraph contains a spoiler for people who have not read The Hobbit. Skip the next paragraph if you want to avoid the spoiler.

• There is a dramatic problem with the climax to the novel. When Bilbo and the dwarves finally confront Smaug, Tolkien has the dragon killed by a secondary character elsewhere, although only after Bilbo has identified its weakness. Dramatically, it's like having a guest character solve the crime in a CSI episode rather than one of your key cast. But it will be two movies before we know how they deal with the issue.

• Warner Bros is requiring critics to hold back on reviews until after the US premiere on December 3. The logic is that it allows reviews to run closer to the movie's US release on December 14; in Australia, it's out on December 26. In many ways, that's perfectly reasonable given the way social media amplifies extreme early reviews over the more considered words of valued critics. But there are cases - yes, difficult to believe - when an embargo is just to postpone the news that a movie hasn't worked.

No matter. We'll know soon enough. Now onto Middle Earth ...

What aspect of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey are you most looking forward to? What concerns do you have about the film adaptation? Leave a comment below.

38 comments so far

Each part of the trilogy "The Lord of the Rings" is longer than "The Hobbit" yet the latter is also to be produced as a trilogy for the screen.

As soon as I heard this I decided to refrain from seeing it. It just seems like a cynical money-grab to me. I urge others to also boycott the film release.

Do over! Do over!

Commenter

GRW Dasign

Location

Abbotsford

Date and time

November 26, 2012, 3:17PM

You obviously haven't read the books. The story of 'Lord Of The Rings' was severely truncated in order to fit in to 3 long films. A full realisation would have taken at least 8 films. 3 films would be about right for a non-expurgated version of 'The Hobbit'. Please by all means boycott it, I beg you. Leave more space for people who have read, understand and love the books.

Commenter

P.Nut

Location

Date and time

November 27, 2012, 1:05AM

Could be worth at least hearing how it is first.

Commenter

Cynic

Location

on line

Date and time

November 27, 2012, 7:43AM

you urge others to boycott the films?serious?boycott a film adaptation of a much-loved classic, with hundreds of millions of fans worldwide?obviously, you're aware that to boycott is to punish or to protest.so that we're clear: you want us all to protest against this piece of entertainment, so as to punish all those who brought it to us.what do you do in your spare time: tell little kids santa isn't real?

Commenter

ease up

Location

Date and time

November 27, 2012, 8:12AM

aaand cue the sound of crickets as 2 million + people ignore you...

Commenter

CSAllen

Location

Date and time

November 27, 2012, 8:38AM

The Hobbit is going to be a trilogy? It would probably work as two movies, but a trilogy seems to be stretching the content a bit thin.

Commenter

JR2000

Location

Date and time

November 27, 2012, 8:46AM

Geez GRW, get a life. "I urge others to also boycott this film release". By Jove man, I can think of a lot of things that are worthy of a boycott, such as NSW Labor, the Catholic Church, Justin Bieber and anything associated with Kyle Sandilands. But boycotting a Hollywood movie for being cynical and commercial? Hollywood cynical and commercial? Never!!

Commenter

Goo

Location

Coogee

Date and time

November 27, 2012, 9:01AM

@GRW, I am sure your seat will be hard to filll.......next you will be "urging" others to join you in drinking the communal green cordial.

Commenter

Bannor

Location

Date and time

November 27, 2012, 2:00PM

Its the back story that I will be interested to see what they do with ie the Sorceror of Dol Guldur. Gandalf is not in the entire story as he goes off to fight the sorceror. I imagine this is why it is 3 movies as their will be quite a bit of time devoted to this.

Other than that the battle of the 5 armies should be epic and I look forward to an army of dwarves going into action.

Commenter

mike

Location

vic

Date and time

November 26, 2012, 3:27PM

The Battle of Five Armies alone could take up a good part of the third movie, if Jackson adds in all that you would expect from the battle that Tolkien did not include in The Hobbit. From memory, it has been almost two decades since I read the book, the battle is more a summary than a detailed event in the novel. Very keen for December 26.